Abandoned treasures fill a quirky marketplace

Richard Pickard, left, and Steve Cox pose with some of the items they pick up at estate sales and storage locker sales and sell online. They organize some of the items in Pickard's garage.PAUL BERSEBACH

Find the auctions

Long before reality TV thrust junk into the public spotlight, Steve Cox spent his days at public auctions, buying up personal belongings abandoned in many of the thousands and thousands of rental self-storage units scattered across Southern California.

The cache is a staggering testament to a nation's abundance. It also represents a proven source of income for Cox, who sweeps aside spiders and dust to rummage through shoeboxes, bags, trunks, plastic bins and jewelry cases, on a search for anything that can be resold at a profit.

Amid endless piles of miscellany are treasures to be found. Cox has unearthed lamps, sewing machines, kayaks, coins, motor scooters, record albums, sex toys and even a rare ukulele that he later hand-delivered to a buyer in Hawaii. The collector arrived by Learjet to meet him and forked over $5,000 in cash.

“If it's been invented on this planet, that's what you'll find” in storage, says Cox, a 56-year-old Costa Mesa resident who has labored half his life buying and selling used personal belongings.

The extraordinary growth of self-storage, now a $22 billion-a-year industry in the U.S., has spawned its own quirky offshoot trade populated by opportunists like Cox and his business partner, Richard Pickard, who run an online secondhand shop, Advancedestatesaleservices.com. They are regulars at the storage yards and at estate sales, often with Cox's 10-year-old son, Preston, who is learning the trade.

Auctions enable owners of storage yards to recoup on uncollected rents and empty out nonpaying units to get them back on the market, but for decades much of the industry kept the sales quiet, advertising them only through required public notices. Storage operators were – and, in many cases, still are – loath to point out that they liquidate their former customers' personal possessions. Delinquent renters often are incensed at losing keepsakes, such as baby pictures and jewelry, they had purposely stashed away for safekeeping.

“It was a hidden secret – nobody really knew about them,” Cox says of the first auctions he attended some 15 years ago. “I was in the antique business for years and didn't know about them.”

A compelling marketplace

For a small number of insiders, the auctions were always a profitable buying opportunity and exciting – a kind of “Let's Make a Deal” where prizes are hidden behind every door. Typically, the storage vault is opened and would-be bidders are allowed a glimpse inside, but they cannot enter the enclosure or touch the merchandise. No one can open boxes or dresser drawers or peek behind standing mattresses. Would-be buyers often bring flashlights to probe into dark corners. An element of mystery, coupled with the tensions of competitive bidding, made the events a natural for reality TV – and, sure enough, along came “Storage Wars,” “Storage Hunters” and “Auction Hunters,” sleeper hits that have attracted a cult-like following.

Despite lingering qualms by the publicity-shy industry, storage auctions have become a well-known, if not quite mainstream, marketplace. Crowds are larger, especially when the shows are in season. A storage room stacked with goods might have sold for $100 five years ago; now the same stash might go for upward of $200, operators say. Storage yards have benefited, but tighter profit margins have put a squeeze on auction buyers.

“It used to be a halfway decent business,” says Dale Lauper of Buena Park, who has been buying at auctions for 25 years.

Few sales draw crowds of more than 50, but to make any significant money a buyer has to be shrewd on both ends – in finding bargains and also in knowing how to flip the goods, get them sold quickly at the best price to make way for the next load. Buyers talk about the hard labor, the “sweat equity,” involved in moving and sorting, deciding what should be set out at yard sales and swap meets and what should be posted on eBay and Craigslist. Successful dealers are able to capitalize on things of unusual value; they develop networks of contacts, people who are willing to shell out the maximize price for a Duke Snider baseball card or a rare hood ornament from a 1949 Packard.

“It's a hustle – it's time-consuming,” says Pickard, a 45-year-old former teacher who began working with Cox seven years ago, selling antiques at the Rose Bowl swap meet. Cox's great strength, Pickard says, is his expansive knowledge.

“Steve could go to any garage sale in America and make money – he's that good,” Pickard says. “He knows antiques, he knows electronics, he knows everything.”

And still, Cox has been burned, once by putting too much faith in collectible Hallmark Christmas ornaments. There was a time, he says, when a single Star Trek ornament could fetch $300 to $400. He bought up ornaments everywhere he could find them, paying $25 apiece for 50 at a time. He invested thousands of dollars before eBay went online, flooding the market.

“I still have … literally hundreds and hundreds of ornaments at my sister's house in Ontario,” Cox says. “They're basically worthless.”

Moving the goods

Cox toiled 10 years as an independent contractor appraising odds and ends for an Orange County secondhand dealer named Dave Hester, who bought storage units in volume – five or 10 a day, Cox says. “He had two big, 26-foot bobtail trucks,” Cox says. “He'd load boxes onto the bobtails and bring them to me. I was responsible for going through all that merchandise. I'd help him figure out what things were good.”

Concentrating on his own company now, Cox, like most full-time buyers, seeks quality merchandise from every available source, not just at storage auctions. Estate sales are one of his specialties. Even with those, and with all of his know-how, the payoff is barely adequate.

“As soon as you make money, you're out buying stuff,” Cox says. “It's all tied up in inventory. Then you've got to pay for storage.”

He and Pickard rent storage units just to house and sort through their acquisitions. Going through the boxes and bags is a strange, voyeuristic experience – a peek into the world of the prior owners. “Their entire lives are in these things,” Cox says. “Toys. Pictures. It is very sad.”

Cox is especially touched by the photos he finds. He spent his early years in Japan, when his father was in the Army, and upon returning home a trunk was stolen containing all of the family albums. He has no childhood pictures of his own. He wonders if those who surrender their school yearbooks, diplomas, heirlooms and love letters – it's all packed away – will ever miss them. Upon finding those mementos, Cox tries to return them to their owners, but sometimes he can't connect or the owners, perhaps dealing with more pressing problems, just say no thanks.

“As they get older, they'll wish they had it,” he says. “The problem is, I'd have a 50,000- or 100,000-foot warehouse to save all this stuff. You name it, it's in there. People will save anything. It's mind-boggling.”

Nasty surprises

Occasionally, storage units become hiding places for drugs, weapons, and things even more shocking and bizarre. In 1991, a house painter named John J. Famalaro, evicted from a residence in Lake Forest, rented a self-storage unit in Laguna Hills and apparently moved in. Months later, in the same unit, he bludgeoned to death a 23-year-old UC Irvine graduate, Denise Huber, then put her handcuffed body into a freezer that he locked inside a different Orange County self-storage unit.

No one knows how long Huber's body might have remained there if the killer had not decided to haul the freezer to his new home in Dewey, Ariz., in 1994. Arrested there, Famalaro was convicted of murder in one of Orange County's most notorious criminal trials.

In 1989, a man stole a new, cherry-red Corvette convertible from a dealership in San Diego and hid it in a storage locker, racking up more than $70,000 in storage fees over the next 23 years. This past September, when the bills became too much, the crook finally turned himself in, claiming he had been coerced into the theft and into hanging onto the car, according to various news accounts. The convertible emerged from storage with four flats, 67 miles on the odometer and still having, in the words of one law-enforcement spokesman, “that new car smell.”

Fears of what's behind the roll-up doors are another reason storage yards tend to shun publicity. Lance Watkins, owner of Storage Outlet, which operates in Fullerton, Huntington Beach and Westminster, recalls the alarm he felt four or five years ago when a manager called to say that a TV news crew was planning to air a report on auctions at his Gardena yard.

“I said, ‘No . . . they're notfilming the auctions,'” Watkins says. His manager replied, “They're filming right now. They're already here.” Watkins says, “I was extremely concerned that when this news piece aired there would be significant backlash. I was prepared for a lot of very unhappy investors – a lot of unhappy people, period.”

Arrival of reality TV

But not a single person complained. The odd drama captured by the short news segment drew attention from more than 30 television producers, Watkins says. “Storage Wars” debuted on A&E Network in 2010. By then, Watkins was willing to allow filming at some of his 15 facilities, exposing his brand; he also acted as a liaison between producers and others in the storage industry.

The reality show took shape with a distinctive Orange County flavor: Dave Hester, Cox's friend with the bobtail trucks, became one of the stars, as did Jarrod Schulz and Brandi Passante, who run the Now and Then Second Hand Store in Orange.

Later ousted, Hester filed a wrongful termination suit in December against the network and the show's producers, claiming that the “reality” is fake – that valuable merchandise is planted in storage vaults to boost ratings – an assertion that the network denies. The case, still pending, has not damaged the show's viewership. Meanwhile, Watkins and his wife, Leslie, who helps to run the business, have deepened their commitment to promoting auctions. Besides launching a website, Storagetreasures.com, that offers tips for auction buyers, they created a series of how-to videos.

Those who pay for the training are invited into a Facebook group where auction buyers from throughout the country compare notes and help each other determine how to value and resell unusual objects. The banter ranges from boasts to questions of every ilk. “Just unpacked a first edition Henry James (novel) with dust wrapper,” one member writes. “So far looking like at least $195. I am pumped.” Another asks, “What's the best way to remove dog hair from a cloth chair? Have tried a vacuum but didn't get near enough off.”

Tips pour in. Some members just enjoy sharing their stories – and there are plenty of them. Rebecca Fox, who writes a blog called Storage Heroes and works part time on the Watkins' website, scours the auctions in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina sent untold tons of chattel into storage. Fox is a 30-year-old former manager of a car repair shop who became aware of the auctions by watching “Storage Wars.” She and a business partner, Brian Monk, now buy and sell full time, going on auction caravans that stop at a dozen yards in a day. Some vaults are enough to turn their stomachs.

Some who have forfeited belongings are in and out of jail, she finds. Fox knows from their letters. “You kind of get to learn their stories.” One wrenching discovery involved a young man with a drug problem. He lost a storage unit that contained four or five letters he had saved from his grandmother – letters “basically reminding him to do his laundry, go to church, don't go back on drugs, don't pawn anything,” Fox says.

Grandma must have hoped the young man would write back to her; she enclosed self-addressed, stamped envelopes for that very purpose. A shoebox in the vault was crammed with 150 of those envelopes, which he had never bothered to use.

“I literally cried for about 15 minutes” after finding them, Fox wrote in a blog. “How sad to have someone love you so much, and to not even write them, not even one time.”

Buyer Ron Russell, a member of the Watkins' Facebook group who lives in Hamilton, N.J., says peering into the lives of those who lost property becomes too much to take. Inside one unit was the mute story of a Latino family that had been deported: jewelry, clothing, washer and dryer, and paperwork from more than a dozen small businesses they had run, from selling granite countertops to cleaning houses.

“It looked like for a while they were living the American dream,” Russell says, “and I don't think they made it.”

A letter in a vault in one tough neighborhood spoke of a young woman's emotional torment. “I'm angry at so-and-so for beating me, angry at so-and-so for raping me, angry at so-and-so for holding a gun to my head,” Russell says, remembering. Those words stayed with him: “I try not to look at the person's stories any more.”

Russell, who is 46, finds money all the time – cash that could have been used to keep the storage unit. There are hoarders. They don't make sense either. One woman's unit was packed with more than 100 bags from a dollar store, the merchandise still inside them.

“There was toilet paper, for godsakes,” Russell says. “A case of toilet paper. A case of Pop-Tarts. What was this woman thinking by storing Pop-Tarts and toilet paper?”

Though most of the time combing through abandoned belongings is drudgery, the auctions are an adrenaline rush, and so are those occasional great finds, buyers say. Hedi Rivers, a 53-year-old resident of New Market, Md., remembers her heart racing the first time she won a unit, for $225. Inside were antiques, knickknacks and LPs that scored her a $700 profit. She was hooked.

“I thought, ‘This is like Christmas, but better.'”

A compartment packed with 30 or 40 bags of pungent, dirty clothes also yielded jewelry boxes, she says. Inside them: $1,000 worth of gold and silver.

“You have to look through everything,” she says. “Sometimes people put money in dirty socks.”

Buyers are instructed to turn in any guns they might find to authorities. Other artifacts, such as hookahs, hash pipes, crack pipes and pot-growing paraphernalia, fall into a grayer area. Rivers has uncovered smoking devices and prescription pills, and worried she might get in trouble for having them. That is where reaching out to a network was helpful. Another buyer immediately stepped in.

“He said, ‘I can take that off you hands,'” Rivers recalls. “He just picked it up and I don't know what he did with it.”

Another time Rivers bought a unit “just loaded with pornography and adult movies and sex toys,” she says. “I was like, 'Oh, my gosh.' I turned all kinds of colors.”

How would she summon the nerve to put it on the market? Once again, her contacts saved her.

“The same guy that took the drug paraphernalia,” she says, “he was very happy to take that off my hands, too.”

Related Links

Richard Pickard, left, and Steve Cox pose with some of the items they pick up at estate sales and storage locker sales and sell online. They organize some of the items in Pickard's garage. PAUL BERSEBACH
Richard Pickard photographs some of the items that he and partner Steve Cox pick up at estate sales and storage locker sales and sell online. They organize and photograph some of the items in Pickard's garage. PAUL BERSEBACH
Steve Cox and his son Preston look over items that will be sold online. Steve and his partner Richard Pickard organize some of the items in Pickard's garage. PAUL BERSEBACH
Preston Cox, Richard Pickard and Steve Cox, from left, look over items that will be sold online. Steve and his partner Richard Pickard organize some of the items in Pickard's garage. PAUL BERSEBACH
Jarrod Schulz and Brandi Passante, stars of the A&E show "Storage Wars," greet their costar, Darryl Sheets. Sheets appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno the night before. "Storage Wars" has become one of cable's highest rated television shows. THERESA CISNEROS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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